June, 2006 - Labelscar: The Retail History Blog

Meadow Glen Mall; Medford, Massachusetts

We’ve recently blogged about the Mystic Mall and Assembly Square Mall in Boston’s inner northern suburbs. There’s a third mall that completes this particular mini-trade area: Medford’s Meadow Glen Mall.

Of the three, Meadow Glen is by far the nicest and is the only one that remains open as an enclosed shopping mall. It is not, however, much larger than the others. Situated in a high-visibility location on Route 16 just east of the Mystic River and I-93, it’s at the western end of the Wellington Circle retail district. At about 400,000 square feet, the mall is a simple dumbell-style shopping mall anchored by Kohl’s and Marshall’s. Constructed in 1979 on the site of a former drive-in theatre, the center features a food court and lots of neon that’s indicative of its vintage. The different zones of the parking lot are even named after old movie stars as a nod to the site’s history as a drive-in theatre.

When Assembly Square Mall was still open, the two malls enjoyed a symbiotic relationship. Assembly Square hosted Kmart and Jordan Marsh and Meadow Glen Mall hosted Bradlees and Marshalls, and each also had about 40 other stores and a food court. Realistically, Meadow Glen’s initial setback came with the death of its sister mall–because Assembly Square failed, the Wellington Circle area lost its cache as a shopping destination. So while Meadow Glen Mall still had some first-tier mall tenants like Express, the other half of the puzzle (retailers like The Gap) were no longer around because of the failures at Assembly Square. This meant that shoppers seeking a one-stop destination went to larger nearby malls in Burlington, Cambridge, Saugus, or Peabody.
This would change in 2000, when the 600,000 square foot big box-style Gateway Center opened in Everett, about a mile to the east. The center quickly became the center of retail activity in the area, and even duplicated several stores (Old Navy, Bath and Body Works, Famous Footwear) from Meadow Glen Mall. Then, in 2001, the entire Bradlees chain folded, causing the mall to lose its principal anchor.

The space would remain vacant for about a year before Kohl’s opened a store in the Bradlees space. During that time, the mall would lose some tenants, including the aforementioned Express as well as the Old Navy store (one of Massachusetts’ first). Still, the mall remained mostly leased, and (apart from a few shifts, such as the swift arrival and departure of Pay/Half in the Old Navy space) the arrival of Kohl’s was a stabilizing force.

Today, the mall remains mostly leased and is a pleasant smaller mall and an ideal example of what I often term “soccer mom malls;” convenience-oriented, slightly off-price, mid sized centers. I honestly don’t know why these centers aren’t more successful in dense suburbia because they put stores that require a large number of monthly visits in an environment that’s less time consuming than a larger enclosed mall, but which also provides pedestrian space and room for smaller, in-line retailers. In the past few years, retail has exploded around the Wellington Circle area, with the opening of the mixed-use Station Landing development and the re-opening of Assembly Square Mall as Assembly Square Marketplace, but demographic changes in the area and increased competition from other nearby centers have caused some slides in the quality of stores (Adam’s Furniture, a local store that has long occupied the former Kmart at the Mystic Mall, has moved into the former Old Navy space.) Because malls of this size and type are having a lot of difficulty, I hope to see it continue to thrive (and pull out of its current minor malaise), especially since its the lone remaining enclosed mall in its trade area.

Also, check out this vintage-ish photo of the old pylon!

Prangeway: Check out these pictures I took on August 24, 2001. A major difference is the announcement of Kohl’s coming to the mall. This was one of Kohl’s major expansions, taking over many former Caldor and Bradlees stores in the northeast United States.

Retail Relic: Old School Kmarts

Some stores are slow when it comes to standardization of their logos or decor, but perhaps none have been more notorious for this than Kmart. Even after their moderately successful rebranding campaign that began in the early 1990s, many of the chain’s stores held onto the older vintage logo scheme, and many (most?) never got interior facelifts.

Even after the merger with Sears, when the company began experimenting with Sears/Kmart hybrid stores (Sears Essentials) many of the interior elements had been left untouched. Judging by how much more successful Sears Grand was, and the fact that Sears Essentials is already being retired, I think that we can guess what that taught us.

Unlike many of the old retail chains that we’re so fond of (Caldor, Bradlees, Venture, Prangeway, and even Ames), Kmart’s stores have rarely been terribly pleasant. When they’ve tried, they’ve built nice spaces, but most of the time they haven’t.

When I took a road trip up to Vermont a few weeks ago, I found the Kmart above with its old logo intact on the city’s south side strip (along US-7). It’s one of the first of its kind that I’ve seen in years, so I figured I should swing in and snap a few pictures. I also have these other photos of old Kmarts in Sacramento and Iowa City that have been sitting on my hard drive for awhile. I have no idea who took them or where they came from, so if they’re yours and you want credit then please let me know.

Apex Department Store; Pawtucket, Rhode Island

Apex Department Stores are a small chain of department stores in the Providence metropolitan area that were mostly shuttered in 2001. They had only three locations: this one, in Pawtucket; a similar but slightly less-remarkable store on Route 5 in Warwick; and a more standard boxy store at the Swansea Mall in Swansea, Massachusetts. Beginning as a tire retailer and growing into a Sears-styled mid-range department store in the true, old-fashioned sense, they downsized aggressively at the same time as Ann & Hope, Bradlees, and Caldor were all closing or downsizing. While the Warwick and Swansea stores closed in 2001 (and the Warwick store was demolished recently), the bare-bones version of Apex continues to operate both online and in a portion of their Pawtucket store.

The “Apex Mall,” as it is sometimes referred, was built in downtown Pawtucket in 1969. Designed by famed architect Andrew Geller, its pyramid-shaped roof is visible just off I-95, and it sits perched along the Blackstone River directly in front of downtown Pawtucket. Pawtucket is a historic mill city with a rich heritage, and this–in my view, historic–structure is directly across the river from the Slater Mill, the birthplace of the industrial revolution in America. Interestingly, these two photos were taken from almost the same place, and they exhibit the vivid architectural juxtaposition you can find in New England:

Today, Apex occupies only a portion of the original building, while the Department of Motor Vehicles is leasing much of the remainder. Because of the size and crucial location of the property, it’s widely speculated that it may be demolished in the not so distant future, especially if rumors are true that the DMV is planning a move to Cranston. While it may be difficult to repurpose such an odd building easily, it would make for an ideal marketplace for a variety of merchants, especially if more of the building was opened up towards the river. In addition, there’s a particularly inspiring (if far-fetched) proposal to turn the building into a museum of Industrial Design. The Providence Phoenix wrote in 2004:

Matt Kierstead, a Pawtucket architectural historian and preservationist who is a fan of the building, suggests that not just the structure’s exterior, but also its conception as “an entire landscape,” and its unbroken interior space, make Apex significant. Kierstead places Apex in the context of a mid-century American design ethos that celebrated mobility and expansiveness. Not coincidentally, the building was conceived and built during the age of the convertible, the drive-in, and the space program, and it reflects the optimism of that era. Less well known is how it was devised by Andrew Geller, a key associate of Raymond Loewy, the man considered the father of American industrial design.

The entire Phoenix article, along with many more photos of the Apex building that are somewhat artier than my own, are available at the excellent Art in Ruins website, which chronicles historic structures (including modern ones) in Rhode Island.

Rhode Island Mall; Warwick, Rhode Island

This is a tragic one.

When I was a kid, Rhode Island Mall was the mall. I always derisively labeled the neighboring Warwick Mall–the successful one today–as the “clothes mall.” Rhode Island Mall was the fun mall. It had the Aladdin’s Castle arcade, it had video game stores, toy stores, and everything else a kid would want. Now it has next to nothing: it’s one of the most notorious dead malls in New England.

What’s especially sad is that it didn’t have to be this way. The Rhode Island Mall had a long, long run as a big and successful center, and it died mostly due to a set of circumstances it couldn’t control and a few questionable management decisions.

Built in 1968 as the “Midland Mall,” this was the first suburban enclosed shopping mall in Rhode Island, and the first two level shopping mall in New England. Built on what was then remote swamplands, it was located next to I-95 and later I-295, and would be the catalyst for a massive amount of retail development that would turn this stretch of route 2 into “Rhode Island’s Main Street.” Providence experienced the greatest proportionate outmigration of any major American city in the post-war era, and Warwick, a suburb about 10 minutes south of the city, absorbed many of these residents, balooning to 85,000 people. To this day, Warwick is the second most populous city in Rhode Island, and many other suburbs in the area (such as neighboring Cranston, with a population of 75,000) are uncharacteristically large.

The Rhode Island Mall is a simple, two level dumbell style mall. It was built with a Sears store anchoring the mall’s west end. As far back as I can remember, the mall’s eastern anchor was a location of Hartford’s G. Fox chain, but it may not have been original to the mall. Despite a seemingly uninspiring layout, the mall is one of the widest and most open malls of its style that I’ve visited, lending the central common areas a certain grandiosity.

In 1972, the larger Warwick Mall opened just to the north of the then-still-Midland Mall. If you look at this satellite photo, you can see how the smaller Rhode Island Mall (at the bottom of the frame) is within a stone’s throw of the Warwick Mall. Warwick was more fashion-oriented from the start, and included Rhode Island’s first outlets of Boston mainstay department stores Filene’s and Jordan Marsh, so this presented a considerable challenge. However, because neither mall was terribly large and there was room for both to house stores without much overlap, they co-existed very peacefully for a long time. The presence of both malls made Warwick into one of the most major retail destinations in New England, and many of the shopping centers that line route 2 for miles in each direction sprung up during the era when both malls were thriving.

In 1984, The Midland Mall underwent an extensive renovation and rebranding, and this was when the Rhode Island Mall name was born. This was still relatively early for a mall to renovate since most of them were still in their infancy, and as such the mall received a substantial shot in the arm as a result. Mall owners added the glass elevator that’s present today, as well as a large food court on the second level outside G. Fox called the Greenhouse Cafes, which was the very first mall food court in the entire Providence metropolitan area. By the late 1980s, the Rhode Island Mall was so popular that management attempted to make room for more tenants by constructing temporary, cubicle-style spaces in the center of the mall’s wide first floor corridor.
Despite the opening of the 3-level, gargantuan Emerald Square Mall in North Attleboro, Massachusetts in 1989 (the first of the larger, more modern enclosed malls in metro Providence), the Rhode Island Mall didn’t suffer–the bigger mall was just a bit too far away, and the two malls combined were still larger than it. Even when Warwick Mall finally renovated in 1991, adding an even larger food court than the Rhode Island Mall, it didn’t seem to have an impact.

The beginning of the end came around 1994, when the G. Fox chain, which was owned by The May Companies, acquired Filene’s. Because Filene’s was the stronger regional nameplate, the G. Fox stores were converted to Filene’s. For a time, this G. Fox store (which was relatively small) was converted to Filene’s, but as there was already a larger Filene’s at the Warwick Mall next door this was extremely redundant and it was closed within a year or two of the rebranding.

That began the long and very slow death of the Rhode Island Mall. Despite that Sears was the lone anchor remaining, most of the stores remained in the mall despite dwindling business, holding on to the hope that the G. Fox store would be filled, but nothing came. By 1997, the vacancies began piling up, and by 1998 there were rumors that the mall would be torn down and converted to another use despite a still-healthy occupancy rate.

In 1999 or 2000, it was announced that the G. Fox store and approximately 1/3 of the mall (including the Greenhouse Cafes food court area, which was now completely vacant) would be demolished to make room for two new anchors. A Wal-Mart would open on the first level, and the tenant for the second level was unannounced. Wal-Mart constructed a store in 2000, but it did not open into the mall, leaving a temporary construction wall to greet patrons inside of the mall. Many speculated that construction could not be completed until a second anchor built a store atop the new Wal-Mart. In 2002, Kohl’s announced that they would be the Rhode Island Mall’s third anchor, and many expected this strong trio of mid-market anchors to bring the mall back to prosperity.

Unfortunately, when Kohl’s was completed, it too did not open into the mall and it became obvious that both had every intention of turning their backs on the mall–permanently. Convinced that the mall would never be anything more than a dead mall again without more anchors, nearly all of the remaining tenants cleared out, leaving the mall extremely barren and empty. Miraculously, the Rhode Island Mall remains open but today there are only about ten stores (out of a high in the late 1980s of close to a hundred) still operating inside of the mall.

I firmly believe that if Kohl’s and Wal-Mart had opened into the mall then the Rhode Island Mall would still be successful today. The neighboring Warwick Mall, despite its size (about a million square feet) has room for only about 70 stores and Rhode Island could still house an additional 50 or so. There is plenty of market demand in the area for such purposes, and the roster of Sears, Wal-Mart, and Kohl’s is relatively strong for a value-oriented mall.

I’ve heard that Royal Ahold (the parent company of Stop and Shop Supermarkets) has leased much of the interior of the mall with the intention of blocking Wal-Mart from being able to expand their store into a supercenter should the mall itself close. I’m not sure if this is true, but if so, I would hope that Ahold would find it in their interest to try and sub-lease that space to tenants, even if they’re charity cases like local retailers or public interest groups.

The following is a 1970 photo of the Midland Mall that I found on Keith Milford’s excellent (in fact, it’s a must-see) Malls of America blog. I’ve also tried to repeat the same shot today, though the mezzanine level of the staircase visible at left was removed in the 1984 renovation:

There are more pictures below, all taken June 11, 2006. A decade after the beginning of its agonizing, slow decline, the Rhode Island Mall is in sadder shape than ever. There are a few things to note. One photo shows the strange way in which Kohl’s is stacked above Wal-Mart, as visible from I-295. Also be sure to pay attention to the shots of the “temporary” construction wall that blocks the mall from Wal-Mart and Kohl’s. That wall has been in place since at least 2000.

Prangeway: I visited Rhode Island Mall on August 25, 2001 and took the pictures below. Note the Tape World store still in operation, the Thom McAn labelscar, and the fact that the Kohls and Wal-Mart “anchors” were under construction with a glimmer of hope that they may open up to the mall. Unfortunately they didn’t, and as a result most of the stores open in the photographs below have closed since then and the mall is currently on life support.

Burlington Town Center; Burlington, Vermont

As mentioned in my last post, I’m going to write about Burlington’s two enclosed malls in a row to sort of illustrate the entire retail “scene” in this picturesque northern city. Yesterday, I blogged about University Mall, Vermont’s largest mall and a relatively standard suburban-style center. Today I’ll be talking about both the Burlington Town Center, which is located right in the middle of downtown, and the Church Street Mall, which is a large outdoor pedestrian mall that forms the center of downtown Burlington.

Burlington Town Center is a long, skinny, two level enclosed mall constructed during the mall-building boom of the ’70s and early ’80s, though I don’t know the exact year. While Burlington is a small city, it’s very cosmopolitan for its size, with a large and young population living right downtown, in part because of the proximity of the University of Vermont. It’s also the biggest city and center of commerce for Vermont, which is a state that never stopped loving its downtowns. As such, it’s really always made sense for one of Burlington’s malls to be located right downtown, and Burlington Town Center has a lot of synergy with the neighborhood. It hinges off of the pedestrian mall, forming a kind of “T” and stretching from Church Street for several blocks towards the shorefront of Lake Champlain.

Unfortunately, like many malls of its size and vintage, it fell on hard times a few years ago, and when I last visited in March of 2000 it was nearly empty. Even then, though, there were some signs of life: a brand new Filene’s had just opened at the end of the mall furthest from the street.

Fast forward six years, and a lot has changed. The center has gotten an extensive facelift inside and out, and the mall’s other anchor (which was an old Woolworths–and later Foot Locker–located on the Church Street Mall and which the mall was originally built off of) has been filled by Old Navy. Except for the long-struggling food court, the mall is now mostly filled with upmarket national tenants. Interestingly, this Filene’s store was still bannered as such on Memorial Day, 2006, when these pictures were taken. I got these just in time because it will be converted to Macy’s soon, if it hasn’t already. As these pictures show, the Church Street mall and the Burlington Town Center mall fit together harmoniously in the downtown retail district, with each both the mall and the downtown hosting different stores and fitting together to form what is by far the largest and best shopping district in all of Vermont.

The problem? It does seem that downtown Burlington has experienced a major burst of prosperity in the past six years, not that it was ever lacking. But something seems a bit wrong this time, and I think it’s the fact that downtown is doing so well that it’s become overrun by national chain stores. This was not the case previously: Burlington Town Center held most of the chains while Church Street was home to hundreds of funky local retailers. It’s true that Chruch Street does still have lots of local character, and is an amazingly pleasant (and distinctly Vermont) place to hang out, but I worry that some of the businesses that lent it character may have been pushed out.

We champion planned (suburban, usually) shopping center developments on this blog, but the truth is that we’re plenty conflicted about what these centers truly mean for our communities. My stance has always been that, with enclosed shopping malls, we’re documenting and discussing a phenomenon that simply exists, and is itself in decline and need of the kind of saving (or at the very least, documentation) that was owed the downtowns initially harmed by malls. The truth is that there’s far more to celebrate about more unique places, but I have always felt that malls themselves provided far more of a place for being than the big box behemoths that are replacing them. Basicaly, I can see reasons why we’d want to try and save our downtowns and our malls.

Pictures of the Burlington Town Center Mall:

Pictures of the Church Street Mall:

University Mall; South Burlington, Vermont

A few weeks ago I started talking about my day trip up to Vermont, and then I uhh, stopped. Sorry about that. Let’s pick back up at University Mall in South Burlington, which is the largest enclosed mall in Vermont.

Of course, this being Vermont and not Los Angeles, the claim of being the state’s largest mall doesn’t mean it’s terribly large. With about 607,000 square feet and around 70 stores, the University Mall is only moderately-sized by most standards. Located on Dorset Street just off I-89, I’m guessing the University Mall was built sometime in the 1970s or early 1980s but renovated within the last five or six years. I visited only once before, in 2000, and I remember it being quite a bit different. Since then it’s been given a new, bright color scheme, and some of the tenants have changed.

University Mall is a decidedly suburban, middle-income suburban mall, with Sears, The Bon-Ton, JCPenney, and Kohl’s as anchor stores. The Bon-Ton store was one of New England’s few Steinbach locations until the chain folded in the 1990s, and the Kohl’s store was an Ames until that chain folded in 2002. The mall is organized in a long “L” shape, with high ceilings and wide corridors. For the most part, the decor is very pleasant and attractive, with a bit of a modern Starbucks/Pottery Barn scheme (complete with cushy couches in faux living room arrangements) that a lot of malls seem to be employing nowadays. My favorite architectural features are the high, sloping rooflines that housed long windows and the brightly-colored honeycomb ceilings in the mall’s largest court, near Sears.

Burlington is a small city, with a population of around 38,000, though it is larger than it sounds because its surrounded by a large handful of sizeable suburbs. That said, it actually has two malls–both this one, and Burlington Town Center in downtown Burlington. University Mall seems to have some of the more suburban tenants while many of the higher-end fashion retailers seem to have migrated towards the city’s center.

Incidentally, there used to be a third mall in the Burlington area: the curiously named Mall 189, located in South Burlington at the junction of US-7 and I-189. Anchored by a TJMaxx and housing under 200,000 square feet of floor space, it died sometime in the late 1990s. If you have information or pictures from when it was alive, I’d love to hear from you.

A Strip Mall by Any Other Name…

Artists' renderings of the proposed Loop complex in Northborough, MA

…is a lifestyle center.

It was announced today that Northborough, Massachusetts–a town that sits in the center of the sprawling web of suburbia between Boston and Worcester–will soon be getting one of the franchise “Loop” concept shopping centers. Named after Massachusetts highway 213, which completes a freeway “loop” around the city of Lawrence, it’s a particularly odd choice to use to name an entire string of centers in faraway places like Kissimmee, Florida. While The Loop Northborough will include a housing component, the site plan (available on the website, and reproduced below) reveals that, bar the presence of a few gazebos and decorative lamp posts, the center is (much like its namesake twin in Methuen) really just a strip mall.

I suppose that labeling this a “lifestyle center” helps move it through the permitting process, since these centers aren’t yet as demonized as malls, big box centers, or strip malls. Still, is it really that much to ask that they deliver on their promise? I’ve seen centers that are well-done, with shops organized along a main street promenade (such as Main Street at Exton, in Exton, Pennsylvania), but this is really little more than a strip mall disengenuously being sold as “pedestrian friendly” or, somewhat laughably, as an “inspired streetscape design, [with] wide sidewalks, custom storefronts with colorful awnings, [and] plentiful landscaping.” Furthermore, the site seems to imply that there is a lack of true “pedestrian friendly” shopping in the area, despite that the massive Solomon Pond Mall opened just a few miles away in Marlborough ten years ago. I’m certain some of this is true, but the plot plan shows long rows of stores facing inward towards a sea of parking. How is this evocative of small-town America, or friendly to pedestrians? The caveat is that, at least according to the artists’ renderings, it will have attractive storefronts and wider sidewalks to accomodate pedestrians, so I may yet be convinced. But at least for now, you can color me unimpressed.

Site plan for the planned shopping center The Loop in Northborough, MA

Newport Mall; Newport, Rhode Island

When we created this blog, the main purpose was to study retail history–to document the way shopping centers are now or were in the past, so that people in the future could have some record of them. Unfortunately, we’ve arrived a bit late–hundreds of malls throughout the United States have already been shuttered, and we don’t have pictures to remember all of them. The Newport Mall is one.

I need to preface my entry about the Newport Mall with a personal anecdote: I was born and raised in the Aquidneck Island town of Middletown, Rhode Island, in a house about three miles from this particular mall. Growing up, the Newport Mall was never particularly successful, and any serious shopping trip demanded a trek off of the island. Since this was the ’80s, malls seemed like a true cultural emblem. I learned about them through TV sitcoms, Fast Times at Ridgemont High and, later, Saved By the Bell, and always felt that we were somehow missing out on this cultural epicentre because our own mall was never able to ascend past being “dead.”

Of course, this isn’t entirely true: Newport is a thriving coastal tourist city, and courts millions of visitors a year. A stretch of Thames Street a little over a mile long in downtown Newport houses hundreds of stores and restaurants ranging from national chains to local institutions, and it is (and always has been) the true cultural and retail center of this area. Apart from the restrictive geography of the island, this is truly why the mall didn’t make it, especially since downtown Newport was the location of choice for most of the better chains that would’ve made their home in an enclosed mall elsewhere.

Still, the allure of the elusive “mall” was probably a big part of why I became so enamored with them, and the fact that my own hometown mall was a “dead mall” likely has something to do with why I became so fascinated with the failure of shopping centers in general.
Labelled 1995 satellite view of Newport Mall in Newport, RI
The Newport Mall opened in 1984. From its birth, it was kind of a hack-job; the developers merely enclosed an existing 1950s (or 60s?) vintage shopping center on J.T. Connell Road (Connell Highway to the locals) and added some extra sales space. The center’s original main anchor, WT Grant’s, had folded and was replaced with a JCPenney store (complete with a sit-down restaurant that had a separate mall entrance, a true rarity), and Peerless (one of the many local Providence downtown department store chains) opened a small outlet at the far end of the center. The center of the mall had been anchored by a Food Mart store with a garish lemon-and-lime color scheme that was distinctly of its era. When the mall was enclosed, Food Mart shoppers were forced to somewhat awkwardly wheel carts of groceries through the mall to get to their cars as the supermarket only had access into the mall. It would be replaced by a TJMaxx not long after the mall opened.

Consisting of about 300,000 square feet and with room for around 40 stores, the mall was not large but was relatively spread out. The decor was decidedly spartan, consisting of exposed steel beams in the ceiling, a large glass atrium at center court in front of TJMaxx, and relatively standard-issue planters and benches throughout the mall. The Newport Mall was also not located in one of the better parts of the city, surrounded on all sides by big city-style decaying public housing projects, and shoplifting was a terminal problem. During the peak of its life (around 1990 or 1991), the center housed about 30 stores, including Record Town, Waldenbooks, Foot Locker, Afterthoughts, Hallmark, Fashion Bug, and other stores that tended to flock to smaller malls. Unfortunately, throughout the center’s life, nearly every store that did open in the mall was located on the wing between JCPenney and TJMaxx. Bar longtime tenant Fashion Bug, no tenants were ever located between TJMaxx and Peerless, and at its best the mall reached about 60% occupancy. The Peerless store itself would not last long, closing a few short years after the mall opened and being replaced in the early ’90s by a West Marine that shunned the enclosed portion of the mall entirely, opening only into the parking lot.

The mall was barely able to survive throughout its entire 14-year existence. The fatal blow came in 1997 when JCPenney announced they were going to close their store at the mall on December 24, 1997. When the Christmas sales were completed, the store went dark and nearly every mall tenant followed shortly thereafter. By the following summer, only Foot Locker, Waldenbooks, TJMaxx, West Marine, and Fashion Bug remained. In fall of 1998, the enclosed portion of the mall (ironically the exact area that was added in the 1984 expansion) was demolished and the plaza was opened back up to the parking lot. The southern end of the mall was also expanded and reconfigured, and an entrance was added to Admiral Kalbfus Road (RI-138).

Because the mall began its life as an outdoor shopping center and is now again a strip mall (titled RK Newport Towne Center), anyone who visited the site today would find no trace of the center’s era as an enclosed mall. Anchored by Wal-Mart (who filled the former JCPenney), Super Stop and Shop (who demolished most of the always-empty southern wing), West Marine, Old Navy, a 99 Restaurant, and a slate of smaller tenants, it has been relatively successful in the past half-decade. Interestingly, TJMaxx and Foot Locker are the only two tenants who continue to operate in the exact same place they were located when the center was still enclosed.

Because the Newport Mall closed seven years ago and was never well-loved, I don’t have any photographs of the inside or outside. The best I can find is the black and white satellite view below, which shows how the enclosed addition (with the gray roofline with the white border) was grafted onto the existing shopping center (much of which has the black or white roofline). If you happen to know of some, I would greatly appreciate if you would email me and let me know.

1995 satellite view of Newport Mall in Newport, RI

Name Change Has Hurt Macy’s

Macy's Logo

According to an article in today’s Columbus Dispatch (again with the Columbus newspaper! What’s going on?), a study recently completed on Columbus-area Macy’s stores since the changeover from the retired Lazarus nameplate has found that foot traffic was down 4.5 percent in 2005, or nearly 50,000 customers. Columbus is the first city where such a study has been conducted, so it may prove to be an indicator that (as many of us suspected) Federated made the wrong choice in retiring the dozens of regional nameplates around the country in favor of Macy’s.

Anecdotally, it seems that most here in Boston had long preferred Filene’s to Macy’s, who took over the local Jordan Marsh chain in 1996.

Dutchess Mall; Fishkill, New York

In keeping with the theme of late, I wanted to post another find about a long-dead mall here in the northeast: The Dutchess Mall in Fishkill, New York. According to the website of the Dagar Group, the mall’s management company, it has very recently (finally) been torn down. I wouldn’t believe it, but this picture seems to prove it’s for real.

Located at the junction of US-9 and I-84, this ragged old mid-70s vintage mall has sat abandoned for nearly a decade. This half-a-million square-foot, simple-dumbell-style mall simply couldn’t compete with the larger titans further north on US-9; it’s actually one of four enclosed malls on the same strip. While one of those four is quite small, the other two–the massive Poughkeepsie Galleria and the large-yet-flailing South Hills Mall–both dwarf this poor old relic.

According to Dead Malls, the place once housed a Mays Department Store and local Poughkeepsie grocery chain Luckey Platt, but neither truly lasted long. The mall apparently was open until 1999, though when I first visited it in March 2000 it was already completely shuttered and had the feeling of having been abandoned for a very long time. The former Jamesway store at the north end of the complex sported a large, barn-like canopy that was eerily foreboding, and the Service Merchandise at the opposing end of the plaza had been converted to a flea market. There were few other signs of life, and the concrete interior floors had about as much charm as a subway station. While plenty of malls die due to demographic reasons or competition–and both certainly played their part here–I really think this place was just plain ugly.

I can’t take credit for this excellent set of photos— I found them all on a really cool website made by someone who refers to himself as Comrade Mr. Yamamoto. His website has even more than the sampling I’ve featured here, but he focuses mostly on road and transit geekery. As our crew is made up of across the board planning wonks–not just retail–we definitely feel like we’re kin. If you have an interest in photos of upstate New York freeway sign gantries, check out his site.